The Big Easy Hopes Technology Will Solve Hard Recovery Issues

The New Orleans city government is using a set of interconnected databases and Web-based applications to help speed its recovery from Hurricane Katrina, and generally improve city services. For example, the city is still blighted by buildings abandoned in the wake of the August 2005 storm that cost over 1,800 lives, and various agencies have been unable until recently to share information and take necessary actions to have those buildings torn down. The new tools are helping city agencies better coordinate their recovery efforts and, in the long term, the city expects these tools to also improve other services, such as road repairs or economic development assistance, and to help residents of New Orleans to hold city government more accountable.

Allen Square, the CIO of New Orleans since 2010, says the city was unable to even measure many of its most pressing problems when he first began in his role. While Hurricane Katrina left the city saddled with thousands of abandoned buildings, officials had no definitive list of the properties, or their owners, which was a necessary part of any recovery effort. As of this November, new software has helped the city step up markedly the number of hearings and other necessary agency activities.

Prior to this summer, information on blighted properties was stored separately by various individual agencies -- like code enforcement offices, redevelopment offices, and legal departments – often using paper records. That lack of central information made forcing owners to fix their properties--or to demolish them--far harder. This lack of centralization also led to a lack of coordination between departments for other services, such as street repairs, or any ability to manage such projects. “If someone asked us how long it would take on average to fill a pothole -- we’d just randomly throw out 365 days -- just a random number with a lot of cushioning,” Square said. “We had no visibility to know how long it actually took.”

To centralize data on city planning—including blight information—Square’s department rolled out a land asset management tool to help city agencies manage, share and track information about building permitting, work orders and enforcement actions. Starting this summer, officials used the new software to input information on blighted properties, gathered from resident 311 calls, code enforcement bureaus, tax enforcement departments and public hearings, which was then centralized in a data warehouse.

The software allows officials in all city departments to view, track and update the steps taken--like alerting owners of abandoned buildings, placing liens on the buildings, or applying for demolition permits--in dealing with boarded up properties.

Initially, the implementation of the land management software slowed progress as officials needed to re-format data to make it usable by the software. But over the past two months, Square says, the software has helped the city become more productive in addressing building issues, with building inspections of blighted properties increasing 70% in October over September, according to Tyler Gamble, a City Hall spokesman. And in November, the city scheduled nearly three times the number of hearings on blighted property as took place in September.

The city has also developed a new online platform called BlightStatus which allows citizens to see data about dilapidated properties overlaid on a city map. That tool, built by the city and the non-profit Code for America, uses data stored in the new database, and can be used to see whether blighted properties have yet been inspected by the city, already seized, or scheduled for demolition.

Beyond helping the city manage blighted properties, the new software also allows officials to analyze updated building permit data by geography, area code and neighborhood, providing them with visual clues into trends affecting various parts of the city. For example, a sudden surge in business permit applications in a certain area could mean the neighborhood is experiencing a small economic upswing, which could be supported by city hall.

Over the next year, Square plans to create more tools that improve the transparency of city government and spur better department performance. One of these apps to be rolled out in 2013 is intended to put more information into the hands of residents, allowing them to track the status of 311 complaints such as broken traffic signals and potholes. “They’ll know how long that pothole has been sitting,” Square said. He also plans to make the complaint information available as an API-enabled data stream, allowing private developers to build apps residents can use to grade city services. “Our goal is to let them hold us accountable,” Square said. “To let them make sure we’re doing our job.”

New Orleans is just one of many cities around the country where CIOs are playing a growing role in government by bringing technology to bear on seemingly intractable problems. That is a critical step, as government at all levels starts to catch up with productivity gains that have been underway in the private sector for years IBM’s Smarter Cities initiative is sending experts to 100 municipalities including Boston, Louisville and New Orleans to give officials advice on how to use data to more efficiently address city problems.